The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Kuraddero must have been thinking along similar lines. He leaned across and murmured: “If this goes on much longer, we’re going to find ourselves saddled with a quivering mass of spawn instead of an army!”

  “They’ve only been practicing a few hours,” Azekazo said, deliberately misunderstanding. “Just think what a spectacle it will be when they finally get it together. Think about entering the city in real old-fashioned empire style.” In the sunshine, please Significant, he added to himself, and pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “It’ll be worth it.”

  “You call this empire style? We could as easily enter Kingsburg in black, with no more ceremony than we would enter Okimako! It would be more appropriate, to my mind, to do so.”

  Azekazo jumped, and looked around at the groups of SAPpers. “Lower your voice, Konio!”

  But as he looked around at the spectators, he felt slightly reassured. Bone-weary city boys far from home, stubby-tailed Chadou, flat-faced yellows from the west—killers all, well-Discipled thugs, they were watching the parade with earnest, uncomprehending absorption, as if someone had given them tickets to the ballet.

  Kuraddero made a noise of disgust. “I wash my hands of this nonsense. This is Lord Osekala’s show. Significant, how he loves spectacle! He’d ride on the neck of one of those, were it in the least practical.” The general pointed at ten full-size mechanical elephants, their howdahs draped with Kirekuni flags (to disguise the fact that there hadn’t been enough gray leather to completely cover their “skeletons”), grindingly turning around in their tracks and plodding back the way they’d come. The “trainers” holding their leashes weren’t, of course, doing anything; rather look to the mechanics whose shoulders bobbed inside the howdahs as they frantically manipulated controls, striving to prevent the elephants from crashing into each other or into the item behind-now-ahead, a fleet of “Chadou chariots” like those the ancient Kirekuni nomads had ridden into war. The originals were supposed to have been fleet little brakes of resin-treated reeds. These were constructed of scrap and pulled by oddly piebald Ferupian farm horses.

  Now and again, in his wanderings through the encampments, Azekazo had spotted soldiers with black-stained hands. They were those whose job it had been to dye the horses’ coats. He said aloud, “Isn’t it interesting how the blacking doesn’t seem to come off people...but by the time those nags get in out of the rain, they’ll be as brown as the day they were foaled!”

  Kuraddero shook his head irritably. “I’ve mounted sieges before. The Okinara insurrection...we were camped on that damned seacoast for eight months while the Creddezi navy stood out from the harbor, stopping them from getting out to the fishing grounds. I’ve heard it said that those little tailless islanders are too clever for their own good or anyone else’s, but there’s no flies on them when it comes to military maneuvers. Okinara! That was a siege all right. But this is something different. The Land of Daemons. The men have been hearing spook stories about this place since they were at their mothers’ knees. I’ve seen SAPpers who are convinced the very air is riddled with occult forces. They burn everything from human bones to citronella to keep them off. If it weren’t so wet, we’d have tents catching fire every night. I saw a sergeant spinning around and around, chasing this tail, trying to catch someone he thought was behind him—he’d been at it for hours, churned up the mud like a small tornado.” Kuraddero gestured sweepingly, encompassing the sky, the parade, the village’s ugly houses with their four-story pretenses to citification, and by implication, the miles and miles of mud-swamped encampments beyond. Rain blurred the horizon. Those far-off spikes that Azekazo thought might be the towers of Kingsburg were probably trees. “Psychiatric cases are the worst for morale. I wonder,” Kuraddero said, not inconsequentially, “where Nagaxa is with those damned reinforcements. It can’t take that long to get here from Thrazen—not if they’ve commandeered trucks as they were supposed to.”

  “We don’t need Nagaxa,” Azekazo said. “It’ll all be over tonight. By tomorrow, at the latest. Then all we have to do is sit back and wait for them to fall apart inside the walls. They’ll be killing each other right and left, if I know nobles—”

  Kuraddero laughed.

  “And as soon as may be,” Azekazo plowed on, “whatever vestiges of a chain of command they have left will go up in smoke. I’ll bet you a case of Valdes ‘02—to be delivered in person once this is all finished—that within a week, they’ll be begging us to come take over.”

  “And we’ll be ready.” Kuraddero snorted sarcastically. In the street, a team of Disciples were attaching ropes to a float glorifying the Djicho ironworks, complete with a forge to be fired up on the day. Around the float loitered a troupe of the smallest, thinnest men the organizers had been able to find. Makeshift fans dangled in their hands; they were to dress as gay-girls and demonstrate erotic dances. It struck Azekazo as ominous that even these transvestites-in-the-making stood about silently—no horseplay, no jokes. How long had it been since he saw a real woman? He’d seen Ferupian captives, of course, who had been worked or raped half to death—but they didn’t count. And inevitably, her face solidified in his mind’s eye. Koeka...

  He’d vowed long ago to avenge her death. He’d jettisoned grief in favor of single-mindedness. But now that he could practically taste his vengeance, his thoughts kept betraying him. Slippery slides of association pitfalled his mind. He stumbled into gaps of concentration as into bottomless pools of black water.

  Yet all could still be lost, no matter what he’d said to Kuraddero in justification of his stratagem, and if the worst happened, it would be he who’d have to come up with alternatives.

  The sister of the Lizard Significant had wanted to fly in for the fall of Kingsburg. Instead, it would be Kuraddero sitting in the flagship float with Lords Osekala, Zachione, Haruhila, and the other northern-sector generals, Saxamoro and Fuza. Azekazo would watch from the sidelines, or catch up with his superiors when everything was quiet. The place for men in his line of work was not the public eye. But all his arranging and persuading would be wasted, in a way, without a Significant here to sanction and glorify the victory. Alas, it couldn’t be helped.

  “It’s a pity Musuka Significant couldn’t be here!” he said, thinking longingly of onyx-eyed, graceful-tailed women—of a Significant made, naturally, in the image of one of her fairest deceased citizens...

  Long after the unexplained withdrawal of the SAF squadrons that had been meant to accompany the Significant army into Ferupe, the advancing forces had received word that not just the squadrons stationed up north but the entire SAF had been grounded. Not by enemy attacks—the Queen’s Air Force couldn’t have accomplished such a thing even in its heyday—but by the simultaneous hunger strikes, rebellion, or sickening of all the daemons in all the transformation engines of the KEs and Horogazis and CHA-12s all over the Raw and in Kirekune. They’d all for one reason or another become useless: they’d all had to be put down. So far, the brownout seemed confined to the air force. One of the statistics Azekazo made it his job to know involved the incidences of daemon failure in the army’s troop carriers and jeeps, and these weren’t so far above average that one couldn’t ascribe them to the long haul, and the long hours, and the appalling weather. The daemons that were dying, though, were the largest, demogorgons like those in aircraft. Some of the SAPpers were attributing the deaths to other things, unforeseen half-understood side effects of forces set in motion by the liberties the Kirekuni army had taken this year. Azekazo rejected their half explanations as superstition, but what other explanations were there? Logic told him the SAF disaster was a coincidence, a freak. Nothing of the sort had happened to the Ferupians’ aircraft—the persistence of Lieutenant-Marshal Burns’s impudent scouts proved that. Just the same, Azekazo had advised Kuraddero and the other generals to press ahead as fast as possible with the Significant-backed, but as yet unscheduled, transfer of all battalions to dependence on internal-combustion engines. The situation could
develop into a crisis at any minute. How fortunate that Kirekune’s legendary habit of reaching for the future had caused it to embrace the Far Western alternative to daemon power even before it looked as though it might be needed!

  For the time being, however, the engines imported from Creddeze were few, those manufactured in Kirekune faulty, and the failure of the SAP caused inevitable mischances—such as Musuka Significant’s absence.

  “A pity? Thank goodness She couldn’t be here,” Kuraddero growled. “Best thing to come out of the whole SAF mess. Who has time to nursemaid one of Them in the middle of a mess like this? Sometimes I see eye to eye with your abolitionists—Skinner and his friends—” He broke off, as if aware he was treading close to blasphemy; even in an informal setting, there were limits. He settled for, “What a tangle we’ve got ourselves into!”

  “Yet one tug in the right place, and the whole knot unravels,” Azekazo quoted. Kuraddero had said that himself, some time after Burns’s first visit to the Disciples’ camp, when the four of them—Azekazo, Kuraddero, Saxamoro, and Fuza—were discussing whether or not to try enlisting the would-be defector to assassinate the Ferupian Queen. This “ideal solution” had been mentioned before, but lacking the means, they’d never seriously considered it. Now a weapon had given itself into their hands and, as always, the possibility of winning by cheating created an ethical conundrum that the generals, as Disciples of the Significant, couldn’t simply ignore. Passions simmered; tempers flared; dicta were hurled like spears. Honor and the exigencies of war had to be weighed against each other.

  In the end practical considerations won out. Azekazo (sitting back, watching the other men torture themselves over the inevitable) had known all along how the argument would end.

  The answer was always yes.

  And since the “ideal solution” had been Azekazo’s brainchild, he’d felt not a little smug. Burns’s own reaction to the proposition had been the first thing that gave him pause. In twenty years of intelligence work (mostly for the army but also, if Kuraddero had only known, for the Significants and factions of the nobility), Azekazo had been immunized against the unthinkable. Nonetheless, the Ferupian’s horror had succeeded in making him ashamed of himself. He’d tried to brazen it out but not been very effective. Significant knew why Burns had subsequently changed his mind and decided to cooperate. Maybe he was suicidal.

  In any case, all that mattered was that he’d agreed.

  “You know that what I hate most is having to delegate,” Kuraddero said stiffly. Azekazo pricked his ears as he realized from the tone that he was about to hear the real reason for Kuraddero’s unease: the reason the general was talking to him in the first place. “Oh, I know he’s your agent technically, and you’re used to delegating—you might as well have cat’s paws instead of hands! But the fact remains, now you’ve given your orders, it’s out of your control. And out of my control. And I hate that. Because I only spoke with the man for half an hour. And the more I think back on that interview, the more I realize that my impressions weren’t of the sort of character one wants handling such a delicate job. He seems very calm and collected, even arrogant, but to have come here in the first place he must be either suicidal or insanely reckless. Unstable: that’s my point, unstable. Can a man like that really be bought with wealth?”

  “Easy, easy,” Azekazo said. It’s easy to tell you’re a child of the old city, General. “I’m not sure why but I’ve never been so certain I wasn’t being double-crossed. And even if the man was a double agent...what harm could he do us? None. All their countermoves so far have been laughably clumsy.” He took a deep breath. “You’re thinking too much, Konio.”

  “What else is there to do?” The general rolled his eyes at the parade, which was still backing up at an excruciatingly slow pace.

  Azekazo said, “We’ve got them wrapped up like a birthday present. The strings are tied. The Burns gambit is just a ploy to expedite the process of suffocation.”

  “Expedite...I hope so.” Kuraddero blew out his breath so loudly that a few SAPpers turned to glance at him. Only slightly taller than Azekazo, the general had nondescript features and a few tail-tattoos in the snowflake patterns of the old noble family of northern extraction whose heir he was. He liked to think he was capable of putting off his power and putting it on again as quickly as he changed uniforms; but the truth—and Azekazo, the original man without a face, pitied him—was that even in the rain, in a crowd, his bearing betrayed his rank. Like most people born to power, he seemed three times as much there as ordinary men. He wiped his nose with a vicious flick of the wrist, and when Azekazo silently offered him his handkerchief, the general waved it away as if it were a whiskey and he a teetotaler. “Yet still, a creature of the front lines. I would far rather have had an aristocrat.”

  “One takes what one can get,” Azekazo said, forgoing the opportunity Kuraddero had given him to expound on the efficiency of infiltration versus subversion. It was one of their favorite arguments but he hadn’t the stomach to make his usual points now. His tail was twitching. “I don’t think he would have accepted the offer if he weren’t reasonably sure of succeeding, and surviving. Trust me—”

  He let it hang, all the possible endings dissolving, the two words purifying into an exquisitely simple demand.

  The front end of the parade trailed past, bearing on stretchers the cause of the latest foul-up: two of the stiltwalkers dressed as ostriches must have collided. One lay groaning with a fractured leg. The other appeared to have broken his neck. Azekazo watched the small, white hand joggling half-open over the side of the stretcher. He glimpsed the face for a second between the jostling bearers. Within the bloodless, parted lips he seemed to see a maw, a gaping entrance to night waters, on whose surface glimmered the reflections of stars. But there weren’t any stars, not here in Ferupe, where cloudy days dimmed to equally cloudy nights. The stretcher-bearers shuffled out of sight, and the street remained empty. After a few minutes gangs of SAPpers wandered out into the river of mud, dispersing, some sixth sense telling them the show was over.

  Kuraddero didn’t move. Azekazo watched him warily.

  “I’ve trusted you before, and I haven’t been wrong yet,” the general said, like a challenge.

  “Nor will you be this time,” Azekazo assured him, though something—the sight of the dead stiltwalker’s face, perhaps, or the memory of Burns recoiling in horror—had already torn at the roots of his certainty that he, or Kuraddero, or any of them, could affect the shape of the war’s ending. It was ending every minute of the day for someone, after all, wasn’t it? Koeka. Since her death he had become familiar with this recurrent sense of futility, this sense that he was deluding himself with his agents and manipulations and his ability to wreak havoc from afar, deluding himself even with the experiments in human nature whose intellectual value, insofar as they proved or disproved his pet theories, he so often reminded himself of when his conscience required massaging. He sensed that he was deluding himself into a wholly mistaken conviction of personal power. It caused him a deep interior flush of embarrassment.

  “Keep him here in Kingsburg, I think,” Kuraddero murmured. “Give him plenty of cash—it can’t hurt—but what will really tie him to us is the promise of power. Set him high in the occupied government and let him make what he can of his position. No one’s immune to that lure. And once we have a hold over an agent, the place he can be most useful to us is where he can potentially rise the highest...and fall the farthest. You taught me that.” He smiled at Azekazo.

  “Dead agents are the least dangerous of all,” Azekazo suggested without presuming to contradict the general, looking at the ground.

  “You amoral, university-grown, ambulatory brain!”

  The words hit Azekazo like a slap. For a second he thought Kuraddero was serious; then, glancing fearfully at the laughing face, he realized the general had just reassumed his mantle of power. The rest break had been longer than usual, but now it was over. Kuraddero ha
d used Azekazo for his own private purposes, used him like a towel to masturbate with, and now he was tossing him back into the bin of underlings in which SAPpers, slopboys, colonels-at-arms and commanders in chief of Intelligence jostled shoulder to shoulder like toy soldiers. “You’re nothing but a player of solitaire, Azekazo...with human cards! You’re a machine!”

  “I meant only to say that talk of government posts and cash stipends is a little premature,” Azekazo hedged. He had meant, of course, exactly what he said.

  A fanfare sawed raggedly through the rain. Kuraddero swung around, cool control in the set of his shoulders, the flare of his tail.

  “Significant! Are they at it again?”

  “They will be if my lord Osekala has anything to do with it.”

  The first ostrich-feathered stiltwalkers—two fewer in number now—twirled around the curve of the street. Instead of real flags they waved soiled bandages. Someone’s idea of injecting a touch of black humor into the proceedings. Tumti-ta-ta-ta-ta, tumti TUM ta-ta-ta, played the martial band, whose first section rolled right behind the stiltwalkers on a flatbed truck. After that came the flagship float. On the day it would be bedizened with greenery and pushed along by so many soldiers you couldn’t see its wheels; today it was hitched to a couple of daemon jeeps that chumbled through the mud in first gear. Azekazo glanced up—then narrowed his eyes. There were men sitting in the thronelike seats. Ordinary black uniforms. And they weren’t even well turned out!—caps askew, legs aslouch, heads lolling. Whatever were they doing? Why hadn’t they been sent packing?

  He gasped. Quickly he looked at Kuraddero. Whose idea had this been? Stripes, staking, isolation, flaying, death—his mind galloped free onto a range of punishments for the culprits.